CURRENT QUEST

Into Ithilien

CHALLENGE

Do not use Leadership or Tactics cards in your decks (or as heroes)

RULES

Freestyle: Beat the quest with no hero/deck restrictions. This is if you just want to play the scenario for fun and not have to worry about doing challenges you may or may not be able to accomplish.

Challenge: Beat the quest within the parameters of the challenge. This is if you'd like to push yourself and your deck building capabilities to accomplish harder things.

For this challenge, you can use any amount of players/decks, but none may have Leadership or Tactics cards in their decks or as heroes.

You may play in Easy, Normal, or Nightmare mode.

If you'd like to participate, just post your story after you're done!

Past challenges:

August 2015 #1 - Beat Conflict at the Carrock with a Hobbit deck
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Hey all. I thought it might be fun if I (or somebody else) proposed a deck-building challenge every week, just to keep things fresh.

So for the next week coming up, I had the idea to challenge everyone to make a deck featuring Brand son of Bain as the prominent hero. You can build more than one deck if you prefer playing two-handed (like I do), and that would allow you to more easily make his mechanic work. Also, you have to beat a scenario with the deck(s), although I'm not sure yet if the scenario will also be specific to the week's challenge or not.

Some other ideas I had for weekly challenges included a Gandalf secrecy deck, a couple of Dwarves and Ents alliance decks, and possibly a Grima Doomed deck.

What do you think? Would it be fun?

Also, I'm sure others will have more creative ideas than mine, so feel free to post your ideas for deck challenges.

Good idea. For awhile, there was a challenge thread on BGG where people could challenge each other to certain specific tasks, like beating Redhorn Gate with a mono-Tactics deck or defeating Siege of Cair Andros with all Hobbit heroes. Those kinds of specific challenges can be pretty entertaining so maybe something along those lines could work, but maybe just as a weekly challenge for everyone.

I like the idea and I really enjoyed that BGG challenge. Unfortunately that thread died out, and I think it's because it burned too hot, too quickly. So I wonder if a weekly challenge is too frequent. In a given week I am lucky if I can find time to make a new deck and test it out. Especially if we are talking about using sub-optimal decks that will require multiple attempts and tweaks. If I had a month, that would be more doable.

Monthly would also work. Anyone have different suggestions as to what the challenge could be??? I want the challenge to be fun, not frustrating, so hopefully the challenges will be doable. I for one have a very difficult time beating a large majority of the quests without powerful decks for some reason, so I don't think a challenge like "beat Lake Town with heroes of all threat 8 or under" would be very fun, simply because I know I wouldn't be able to do it.

I think this sounds like a fun idea that I could get into once I finish all the current scenarios. I think I am fairly weak at deck building in that I can only build one type of deck. Anything else becomes difficult for me to build so this challenge would probably strengthen my deck building skills and force me to use cards that I may be overlooking due to my preferences.

"beat Lake Town with heroes of all threat 8 or under"

I'm tempted to try this now...

I don't have specific ideas for challenges off the top of my head, but I think more specific like the above is the way to go. Restrict our options to force us to be creative about it.

I also agree that monthly would be better than weekly. If this takes off I might well try and do all the challenges and post about them on Warden of Arnor, but I only have so much time and like to do other posts as well, so weekly would be a stretch and it'd be more likely I'd just cherry pick the challenges I particularly liked/found interesting.

I've always had an idea of awarding a score based on the heroes you choose. Like you would get 1 point if you used Glorfindel but 5 points if you used Fatty. It could also penalize cards like Steward of Gondor and reward Keen-Eyed Took. The advantage with this system is it allows newer/weaker players to build strong decks to beat the quest, but challenges experienced players to build sub-optimal decks to get the highest score. The disadvantage of course is that you need to assign arbitrary scores/ranks to every hero, if not every card.

Though i wouldn't have the time or skill to take part myself, i think this whole idea is awesome and would really enjoy reading reports and following the challenge thread.

I really hope you go through with it, it will be great

I tried to run something similar but more based on achieving specific things in particular quests more so than deck building challenges. People showed interest but it didn't really go anywhere =( I had fun for the first few weeks attempting the challenges myself though...

I hope if you do start this people are a bit more responsive and participate. I don't really deck build outside my two decks I always use so will unfortunately have to sit this one out though. Will definitely be following and reading up on the challenged though =)

Haha yeah, remember back in the day when Leptokurt held those fun Mono sphere challenge/competitions? Those were the days;)

Alright. So then how do you guys want to do this? Do you want me to just say a challenge? Or would you guys like to vote on challenges?

we could all give input and then trust you to choose what people seem to like best. And if your able, it might be better if we could do biweekly. It would suck to wait a month to build and show of a cool deck and then not be able to do it for different reasons. No one would have to do it every week; some could do it once a month or whatever they wanted. it would be totally a personal choose how much you want to do it. another good thing would be that you could choose which ones you wanted to prioritize. if you hated the idea of one thing everyone had decided you wouldn't have to wait an entire week for the next go.

I would like to participate in something like this.

Okay. Well one more question. There are certain challenges that I think would be extremely fun and challenging that some people would be opposed to doing. For example, if I gave the challenge, "Beat Foundations of Stone with four players, each with a mono-sphere deck," then how many of you guys would NOT do it, because you guys are more inclined to doing solo play/don't want to go to all that work? I don't want to give a challenge that people won't do, and yet that seems like it would be very interesting.

EDIT: I just wanted to clarify that I didn't mean to sound rude in that post. Rereading it made me realize that it may have sounded a bit... condemning? Sorry if it did.

Many players here are solo, don't have a huge playgroup, etc. so multiplayer challenges are quite hard to realise I think.

I might be able to access 4 players... winning on the other hand would be... interesting. not done to much mono sphere... might be fun!

I usually play either two-handed solo or two-player, but I don't think it would be too hard to do four player solo. But really though, if you guys think that multiplayer challenges would be too much work or too stressful to keep track of everything, I'll just cross them off the future list.

Four handed play is a pretty big faff, though I've done it once or twice, so I'd consider it for an interesting challenge. Personally I play 3 player pretty frequently so that'd be OK for me, but I guess other people maybe not.

I think these types of challenges are best suited for 1 or 2 player. 3 or 4 player games take a long time, so I don't know if I'd want to "sacrifice" my limited 3/4 player time to attempt a crazy challenge that could take multiple tries.

Kay, good to know.

Here's another idea for a challenge...

Use the "Big Three," as I like to call them (Eowyn, Beregond, and Beorn), to beat Shadow and Flame.

The scenario is of course changeable. But now I really need input from you guys. Is there a particular challenge that has already been mentioned that you'd like me to set as the challenge of the month (or biweekly, depending on how it plays out)?

Or is there one that you'd like to suggest? I think I'll put the current challenge in my first post once we get a majority wiling to do it.

How about:

Beat passage through mirkwood with tactics mono using MINIMUM additional APs of progression style. Can you do it with just core? Core plus hunt/gollum? Etc..

Just a thought, not much deckbuild scope.

Edit: also, deck designs composed COMPLETELY of allies would be fun. What an army. Trying to get ally abilities to mimic non-ally cards

So, I love the idea. I just want to throw out my preference. I think the challenges work best if they are 1/2 player and if they focus on building a deck for a specific quest or to achieve a specific goal (like beating a quest in 3 or fewer turns). I think the shadow and flame suggestion is a good one. I have always wanted to experiment with high threat heroes against that quest since you drop to 0 anyway (like Gandalf, Elrond, and Treebeard).

Edit: also, deck designs composed COMPLETELY of allies would be fun.

I made a deck like that once and it worked really well if i remeber correctly.

And for the challenges i would really like to do them, but i don't have all cards, not a 3-4 player game possiblities nor all quests so i can't do all challenges.

One challenge might be to build deck around some cards like hidden cache, Caldara or Zigil miner (i have actually done all of those in the 2-player decks) or another one (not so deck building challenge) would be to hunt down one really bad enemy in some quest like Mumak or Attercop.

How about:

Beat passage through mirkwood with tactics mono using MINIMUM additional APs of progression style. Can you do it with just core? Core plus hunt/gollum? Etc..

Just a thought, not much deckbuild scope.

Sorry, but I just don't see how this is a deck challenge. I might be wrong, but I'll assume that most of the players have just 1 core set, and this is called a "deck challenge", but in the core set there is not enough cards to build even a single monotactics deck. Now, core + first cycle pool would be fun. Going back to our roots, you know.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/18770081#18770081

Is this the thread on BGG that you guys were talking about? Because either way, there's some good idea's on this thread that I think I'm going to.... Borrow. Unfortunately, we don't have a currency system on the FFG forums that we can use to give rewards, but that's okay.